LIKE any government or centre of power, the White House has a love-hate affair with the media. The American media in full flight, untrammelled by Irish-style libel laws, are a fearsome sight.
Richard Jewell, the security guard at the Atlanta Olympic Games who was first the hero of the bomb blast at the Centennial Park and then the villain, is a prime example of a victim of media frenzy. Now that the FBI has belatedly cleared him of all suspicion, he is trying to recover his reputation, but may not get much financial compensation.
The media argue that they were reporting a fact, namely that Mr Jewell was regarded as a suspect by the FBI. This is usually a good defence against libel. If a person is any kind of public figure, virtually anything can be reported about him or her without threat of libel as long as malice cannot be proved on the part of the writer or media outlet.
This is the country of the First Amendment, guaranteeing free speech, so any president must be prepared for regular media onslaughts. Bill Clinton has had his share of these, including the Whitewater affair, allegations of sexual misconduct and claims of improper fund-raising in the recent election.
Oddly enough, Republicans and conservatives believe that the President gets an easy ride from the largely liberal media in Washington and New York. The conservatives claim that most of the reporters and radio and TV producers are liberal in their views and so are biased in favour of the Democrats and Clinton.
To support this claim, the conservatives cite a survey which shows that almost 80 per cent of the leading Washington journalists voted Democrat in the 1992 presidential election. A recent article in the left-of-centre New Republic on why Clinton got such favourable media coverage in the 1996 election said the reason, apart from good White House PR, was that "Clinton and his people are, to most journalists, culturally sympathetic".
The article continued: "What every conservative press critic preaches, and almost every reporter denies, is largely true: the mainstream press is liberal. Most Washington reporters share with the Clinton aides a language, a value system, a set of buttons."
Odd then that a report showing White House paranoia about the right-wing bias of much of its press coverage has now been revealed. The anti-Clinton coverage of Whitewater prompted the White House legal office to compile a detailed report on what it ponderously calls "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce".
The 381-page report says it has uncovered a "media food chain" through which a wealthy member of the Mellon family, Richard Scaife, inspires a "media frenzy" of anti-Clinton stories.
Mr Scaife, described as a conservative philanthropist", funds a right-wing think-tank, the Western Journalism Centre, and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Anti-Clinton "conspiracy theories and innuendo" move from these sources to the Internet, the right-wing American Spectator magazine and London's Sunday Telegraph, the White House report claims.
From there they re-enter the "right-of-centre mainstream media" in the US such as the Washington Times, the New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal Then Congress, through various investigative committees, feels obliged to look into the reports and "the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the mainstream press as a `real story'".
The existence of this White House report, which is a mixtures of analysis and copious clippings, was revealed this week. Its origin goes back to the press coverage of the suicide of a senior White House legal aide, Vincent Foster, early in the Clinton first term.
As the suicide spawned ever wilder theories, the White House legal staff and the Democratic National Committee collaborated in this report to bolster its "conspiracy theory". The report is over a year old, but several weeks ago the American Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph both carried an interview with a former White House aide on what really happened the night Mr Foster was found dead, and who was sleeping with whom.
So that particular "media food chain" is still churning out the anti-Clinton line. Next Monday, the Supreme Court will be hearing the Paula Jones case and the allegation that she was sexually harassed by Clinton. That story also began in the Spectator.
This week, the White House press spokesman, Mike McCurry, defended the report and claimed that it had been given to selected journalists back in 1995, although the reporters deny this.
According to McCurry, the White House provided the material "because we wanted to refute some of the very aggressive charges being made fallaciously against the President, most often on the Internet, coming from a variety of kind of crazy right-wing sources".
Both right and left-wing media are bemused by the White House report. Journalists never like being accused of being part of a conspiracy.
The Washington Post media correspondent, Howard Kurtz, says that "a conspiracy suggests a bunch of people meeting in a dark, room, and that's nonsense. But some conservative publications have gleefully seized on the opportunity to repent anti-Clinton material after it has appeared on the other side of the Atlantic."